The Museo Kardinal opens on Jaime Cardinal Sin’s birthday on August 31.
“This is ours,” the Most Rev. Jose Corazon T. Tala-oc, Bishop of Kalibo said during the launching of the rehabilitation of the Sin ancestral home in New Washington, Aklan, on June 9.
It will indeed be the museum of the people of Aklan and beyond.
It is a sentiment echoed by Maricyn De Los Santos who heads the National Museum of the Philippines in Iloilo. “Museums are custodians, community museums are keepers of important memories,” she said. Aklanons should own the Museo Kardinal in order for it to “resonate and be meaningful, else it will just gather dust.”
The museum should reflect the values the Cardinal espoused like the family and social justice; De Los Santos continued. It should reflect the shared values in Aklan “as part of the commonality of us all.”
The museum, entrusted by the Serviam Foundation to the Diocese of Kalibo, will house the memorabilia of the Cardinal, his desk, and the vestments and cassocks that he wore, including the biretta, the square cap worn over the zucchetto or “skull” cap, the mitre, familiar to us as the pointed hat that bishops wear, and the symbol of the Cardinal, his coat of arms with the motto “Serviam”, or “I will serve.”
The Museo Kardinal will also house religious icons, paintings, images and art works connected with Cardinal Sin and his life work and which reflect Christian values, said the Rev. Father Justy F. More.
The National Museum in Iloilo was in Kalibo and New Washington to view the Sin ancestral home fronting the town plaza and to give lectures on the intricacies and mechanics of opening and maintaining a museum.
Jaime Cardinal Sin was was born on August 31, 1928, in New Washington, Aklan, the 14th of 16 children. The Museo Kardinal will also showcase personal touches of the family, including the very long dinner table that accommodated a large family.
The 30th Archbishop of Manila, Cardinal Sin was the third Filipino cardinal after a long string of Spanish, American and Irish bishops of Manila, the symbolic seat of Catholicism in the country.
Long a critic of the martial law government of President Marcos, he and Cory Aquino were at the center of the peaceful People Power Revolution in 1986; he was at center stage again in the 2001 EDSA Revolution that ousted President Estrada.
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